December 10, 2014

DAY 9, FEMINISM AND FITNESS - Suzanne Scanlon

SCARY MARYSuzanne Scanlon

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not
dined well.—A Room of One’s
Own, Virginia Woolf

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words
don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew
that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because
the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or
not. —As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

1987, Aurora

Sister Mary calls me into her laboratory room just off the
classroom. She yells, asks me to explain why I am giving up. I’ve failed a chapter quiz. She raises her voice. I try not to smile. You
have so much promise—but you are throwing it all away. Don’t
you care?

I don’t remember what I said, how I denied
to myself that she was right. I do remember talking about it over lunch, my
best friend repeating the conversation back to me, which she could hear from
the classroom. I laugh it off. As if I wasn't moved.

1992, New York, NY

The second time I read Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own, I am
lying in my single bed in a cement walled room of my own on a New York State
psychiatric ward in Washington Heights. I read As I Lay Dying in that
same bed. Faulkner’s book about the body as meat,
I remember my professor saying. It did not occur to me that my body was meat,
too: that the goals of the hospital where I lived for the next many months
which became years, had much to do with the disciplining, the confining, the
containing of that body. The hospital offered me a room of my own, but the room
came without a door; I was “checked on”at fifteen minute intervals by a man or woman with a clipboard and, as
often as not, a lack of regard for my humanity; I was told not “to isolate”. Isolating
was grounds for losing privileges. Privileges meant leaving the ward,
the building, the neighborhood: for an hour, an afternoon, a day. No one
mentioned white privilege, but that was there, too—a selective state
hospital treating predominantly white women; low-level staff on the ward were
predominantly black women.

My room was my own, but it was only temporary, dependent on my
being ill; and paid for by the taxpayers of New York[1].

We called her Scary Mary, though she was nice, not scary, but we
were mean. And it rhymed. I couldn’t take Sister Mary seriously because
if I did I would have to change and I wasn’t
able to change, not yet. A Buddhist proverb:

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

That same year marked my first real diet: the quiet, unmarked
beginning of a preoccupation (with meat, with my meaty body) which would own me
for many, many years. One day, Mrs. Gordon, our religion teacher who
occasionally spoke in tongues, saw a copy of Cosmopolitan on a friend’s desk and told her to put it away
before she threw it away, announcing to our class that “the devil lived in
the pages of that magazine.”

One of the articles I recall most from Cosmopolitan was a
feature story:“Lose-
Seven-Pounds-In-Seven-Days”. It was the Cosmo Spa Diet, and it
would be my first real diet--something insignificant at the time, a phase or
passing fancy. The discipline and structure required for the diet appealed to
my Catholic girlhood; to punish myself felt religious. For seven days I ate: ½cup oatmeal for breakfast; a cup of raw mushrooms and one hard-boiled
egg for lunch; a slice of chicken breast for dinner; and two rice cakes as late
night snack.

I discovered the satisfaction in waking with hunger, with a
stomach flatter than it had been the day before. My first mortification.

I wasn’t in a mental
hospital in New York because of dieting, but you could say that I was in a
hospital because I’d realized, at
some point before my 21st birthday, that I would spend the rest of my life on
some version of the Cosmo 7-Day Diet and that, among other ideas related to
life and language, felt unbearable.

When Mrs. Gordon linked the devil to Cosmopolitan
magazine, she might have been invoking what Chris Kraus calls the schizophrenia
of being female: Think for yourself! What really matters, though, is how you
look!; or, the impossible demands of rigid femininity: Dream big! But,
of course, you must find a man!

She wasn’t, though; we
knew the devil Mrs. Gordon feared had more to do with how we, almost-women,
thought about sex; we knew the magazine’s insistence, that women should
have sexual agency, was exactly what our teachers didn’t want us to learn.

1990 (Los Angeles)

The first time I read A Room of One’s Own, I had just seen Glenda
Jackson and John Lithgow perform Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the old Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood in a
production directed by Edward Albee himself; though I must have learned
something that night in the theater, I couldn’t
say what; the title seemed both warning and urging. There was something so
smart but so dark, ugly in Albee’s
view of marriage; I couldn’t know if it was
real. At 18, I’d witnessed
marriages where the two parties seemed to dislike, if not outright hate each
other--but George and Martha were of another order altogether. Why would
someone stay with someone they hated so much? I wondered, as young people do. Just leave! I wanted to say to
those couples, as if it were so simple, as if hate was not all mixed up with
love and care and need and rage and habit and friendship and sadness. Longing
and loss and sorrow. As if marriage was not just this: standing side by side
over the void for the rest of your life.

Sister Mary warned me that my falling grades would ruin my
chances of getting into National Honor Society, which, she added, would ruin my
chances of getting into a good college. She was right, but I knew it didn’t
matter. I laughed at her, though I enjoyed her attentions; I was so desperate.
Didn’t anyone notice that I was slacking
off? Didn’t anyone care? To
be loved without criticism is to be betrayed. I read that line in book by
Adam Phillips, and it haunted me. Philips later quotes D.W. Winnicott: It is
a joy to hide, but a tragedy not to be found.

If Sister Mary or Mrs. Gordon or anyone else at my girl’s high school had addressed the
fundamental dilemma (addressed neither in our Catholicism nor curriculum) that
occurred to me first in those pubescent years--that is, how to have a life of
the mind and a female self, all at once--perhaps I’d have listened. If someone had told me that much
of what I was learning as female: deference, passivity, dependence—was
antithetical to the qualities of mind and self I’d
need to be an artist, a writer, a thinker; I like to think I would have
listened.

But probably I wouldn’t have. I wasn’t ready.

Woolf’s book-length essay began as a lecture
she was asked to give for two women’s colleges of Cambridge. Early on she
describes a meal she has at the men’s
college: soup and salmon and ducklings. Woolf writes,

“It is part of the novelist’s
convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon
and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a
cigar or drank a glass of wine.”

The women, Woolf notes, do not receive salmon or ducklings; the
women are served “plain gravy soup”and “beef with its attendant greens and potatoes—a
homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts
curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and women with
string bags on Monday morning.”

Sister Mary had my number, as the kids no longer say—but
she lacked authority.

There was a long-running play, onstage in these years, titled Sr.
Mary Ignatius Explains it All to You. Another Catholic-bashing hit was
titled Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? The lapsed Baby
Boomers made an industry of entertainment mocking the absurdities of a church
within which some of us were meant to live. In those days, few seemed to find
it problematic that nuns received so little respect. The Catholic high school I
attended—an
inferior girl’s college
preparatory institution—lacked authority. Rosary High School
had a brother institution (I use the word in all resonance), Marmion Military
Academy, just a few miles away, which was radically different in structure and
curriculum; the only thing the two schools shared were the combined mission of
religious indoctrination and single-sex education. Marmion had more AP classes;
a longer and more thorough summer reading list; higher test scores and
acceptances into highly selective universities. Marmion was wealthier, more
prestigious, and, even architecturally, superior to Rosary--a single level,
single building structure, shaped like an upside down horseshoe. Rosary offered
one AP English class.

It wasn’t impossible to
get a good-enough education at Rosary—if one weren’t, like me, so utterly distracted by the Cosmo
Spa Diet--but still, the designation of “college-preparatory”was relative, or so I learned once I actually got to college.

The entranceway to Rosary was a wall of glass, with doors opening
to a hallway where we gathered before school dances, plays, and assemblies.
This was where we practiced pom-pon routines after school. Rosary—we
pronounced it Rozharee (a mark of further derision)—students,
cheered for Marmion boys in sports: and not the other way around (though Rosary
students did play their own sports).

I’m sure there were many women in
England and beyond who would happily eat the meal that Woolf derides; it took
me some years of rereading and teaching the book, to understand how wholly
situated in bourgeois privilege Woolf’s
genius could be. Now it is as necessary for me to understand the privilege that
gave her this insight, as it is to acknowledge my own.

Something else, too: Sister Mary was breaking down. We’d been watching it all year, though we
didn’t know what a mid- or quarter- life crisis actually looked
like. There were signs, small changes or departures from curriculum that
revealed a conflicted self beneath the pedagogical performance. In the middle
of an otherwise dry lecture on mitosis and meiosis, she’d veer
off into reveries on her father, who’d
read Robert Frost to her, who called her “Wiggle”;
who taught her Serious Life Lessons. My friends laughed at her, and so did I[2].

“Wiggle,”she quoted her father,“I took the road less traveled, and that has made all the
difference.”

It was embarrassing—though I think now that we were also
intrigued. There is nothing more interesting than a person honestly, openly in
spiritual and intellectual crisis: moments when the narrative ceases to provide
a sustaining framework. Everything I thought I knew was no longer true.
I tell my students to find these moments, to write through these moments: A time
when something you always believed no longer felt true. Narrative breakdown. Joan
Didion, in The White Album, an essay that explores such a time in her
life:

We tell ourselves stories in order to
live . . .

Or at least we do for a while. I am
talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories
I had ever told myself . . .

Sister Mary did not stop teaching us Biology, but she did make it
clear that there were more important things in life. Eventually she left
Rosary; she took a leave of absence from the Dominican order. Later, I hear
that she left the convent altogether, came out as lesbian, and was living with
a partner in the south suburbs.

Part of Rosary’s lack was communicated through the
obvious inequities I noted above, but it also had to do with the presentation
of authority. Authority, we’d all learned in
the MTV-dominated 1980s, linked to style. Madonna had authority; Cyndi Lauper
did, too. Prince. Michael Jackson. Dominican nuns: even in the updated shorter
habit and veil, lacked authority.

These days, I see all the ways a life of quiet service is
heroic--but that is not what I saw as a young girl. It may be that I could not
imagine subversion from a life so familiar; but I think it was also clear that
there was nothing radical or inspiring in subservience.

Not long ago, a group of nuns in Madison, Wisconsin took over a
Benedictine Monastery to use for retreat and women-centered services. The Holy
Wisdom Monastery offers ecumenical retreats, prayer services, environmental
work. “The bishops are furious,”a friend explained, “but they can’t do a thing about it!”

In the extreme
renunciation of sensual pleasure, the nuns who educated me did nothing to
inspire my awakening appreciation for what Gustave Flaubert would call the
refinements of femininity. Flaubert’s
Emma Bovary, too, lost her mother and was raised in a convent. The education
she received there was far less compelling than the education coming from
novels. What did nuns eat? We wondered. We tried to find out, but then, one or
another of us would return from a dull visit to the convent with a report: “They
shop at Aldi,”the local budget grocery store
stocking generics, and our interest would wane.

When I began starving myself, I came to understand, at least
momentarily, what it was to be a nun: that is, I understood anew the pleasure
that comes through abstinence and deprivation.

Emma Bovary, in the midst of despair after a disappointing
affair, starves herself:

She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a whole
day.

Flaubert knew of the link which exists between religious and
sensual passion. If you asked me then, or in the years following, I would not
have been able to articulate what is so clear to me now: like Emma Bovary, I
was in a profound spiritual crisis. There was no room for who I needed to
become in life as I knew it. All options were disappointing, impossible, or
both. To become a woman--nun, wife, movie star, mother no matter—seemed
either impossible or horrid. The thought of spending the rest of my life in a
body that I could not control, nor wished to control, filled me with dread.

That all of these thoughts coincided with my first real diet was
not coincidental. During my hospitalization, I was made the subject of a
Byzantine study, where staff made comments in a chart of my “bizarre
eating habits”. A therapist in New York told me that she was told me the
results of a study she was involved in, linking women’s depression to protein intake. This was in the
1990s, a time when low-fat diets were trendy; I would spend days eating nothing
but low-fat carbohydrates: rice cakes, a bagel, fruit, Diet Coke. To eat
protein terrified me; it left me feeling full, which then left me feeling fat.
This dysmorphia meant that I felt quickly and swiftly the alterations in my
body from thin to fat, which in turn led to to self-loathing or elation--rapid
shifts from one to the other. It was a complicated daily, hourly process of
interpretation and emotion. How insane this physical and mental activity seems
to me now! What an absurd waste of time and energy! How politically disturbing,
too, when I consider so many smart, complicated women consumed this way: how to
control their meaty bodies. Better control a body than challenge a world that
has taught her to hate that body. A world that both valorizes and despises
fleshy young bodies.

I don’t want to deny the truth and validity
of my perspective in those days, however warped. Still, I would have little
patience for myself, from my current vantage. It seems rather ridiculous to me
now--not eating, channeling energy and focus and drive towards such a shallow
concern; and yet, so many intelligent, complicated, smart women fall into this
same very trap.

Something else I learned about myself in those early days of
disordered eating / preoccupation with diet: It didn’t matter to me that I knew it was a trap. It was
not something I could not do.

There is another world, but it is in this one, wrote
Yeats. I like to think that Woolf allowed me to travel not just away from my
family, but away from the ones who educated me, whom I resented because they
could not teach what I needed to learn, but also because, I could no longer be
taught. I needed to live, to play out these lessons and learning.As Fanny Howe put it in her novel Indivisible:
For the truly mad, it’s not enough to
merely tell stories. They have to act them out.

The third time I read A Room of One’s Own, I am a teacher, sitting in a classroom
with seventeen young women and one man. One after another responds to Woolf’s book by reading this line:

One cannot think well, love well, sleep
well, if one has not dined well.

Emily speaks of body image. Alex notices how prophetic Woolf
seems to be, but also how off she is in other ways—particularly, in
her declaration that women will soon cease seeing themselves as “a looking glass”for men. Jane brings
up Foucault’s ideas of
policing and discipline; the new police state is one the inmates run
themselves. I speak of ways that constructions of mental illness have
traditionally colonized women and individual identity. I think about how normalized
it is for these women.

It strikes me how differently these students view mental illness
and antidepressants, compared to how it was when I was in hospital. There is
something dangerous about the asylum structure—the way the
institution itself was larger than we were, shut us off from the world—even
with the intention of helping us.

My students, this generation following my own, seem to have
integrated their sense of self and so-called mental illness more thoroughly,
able to casually talk about the various pills they are on, their diagnoses. Maybe I am optimistic, but it
seems that they know mental illness is constructed, linked inexorably to
culture and that it is real, that there is nothing necessarily abnormal
about it. That is, they know that it is 'wrong' - the over diagnoses, over
reliance on pills. The difference is they don’t disown it, and
the meta-relationship to their own constructions of mental illness inspires me.

Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months
before the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding
the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing
with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People
who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant
one.

I leave class and return home to my baby; however much joy having
a baby brought me it was after his birth that I came, again, to long for a room
of my own.

A part of me wanted a second baby, too, though the further loss
of time to myself—time for reading and writing and being—
terrified me; it was in the midst of this reading A Room of One’s Own this third time that I had
the first in a series of miscarriages. This particular spring, I spent weeks bloated
and nauseous, tired and dizzy, before finding, early one morning, blood in my
underwear.

At the hospital, the doctor gave me an ultrasound and confirmed
what I knew:

“You are having a miscarriage.”

A nurse gave me enormous pads, a prescription of heavy doses of
ibuprofen, and told me to call if the pain became worse. I went to class that
night, dopey on ibuprofen, and, for the ninety minutes of the class period,
talked about Judith, Shakespeare’s
theoretical sister imagined by Woolf in her essay; genre-mixing, anger in women’s writing, Woolf’s advice in the shadow of her suicide; I almost
forgot to notice the cramps that meant I was bleeding out a baby.

The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all
mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no
doubt in another million years.

That same night, I dreamed that Woolf herself came to me, as if I
were her student (I am); she told me that it was a wise choice--to lose the
baby, she said--and I told her that it wasn’t my
choice--and she asked me, But you want to write, yes? You want to write?
I said, Yes, of course I do. Well, was all she said. Well.

And then I woke up.

[1] Nothing like this exists any longer,
in New York or elsewhere. In the mid-nineties, funding was cut for mental
health services, and the long-term ward, as it was known, was closed.

[2]In those years, in most of my life
before university, I defined myself in relation to these girl-friendships. I
did not know how I felt about anything, but I did know how my friends felt, or
how I was supposed to feel.

Suzanne Scanlon is the author of Promising Young Women (Dorothy, 2012). Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The American Scholar, DIAGRAM, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other places. Her essay writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, The American Scholar, Time Out Chicago, The Chicago Reader and elsewhere.

Her 37th Year, an Index, was chosen for The Iowa Review
fiction prize by Allan Gurganus, who called it "a thoroughly engrossing
almanac of desire." A novel developed from this short fiction will be
published by Noemi Press in Feb. 2015.

promissory

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ORIGIN STORY: It was 2006. Some of us wished the women poets we admired would write more about poetry and poetics, experimental, post-avant. Some of them weren’t writing about these things at all. Why not? They’re busy, some of us surmised. Some of them were writing about these things, but some of us were greedy, and wanted them to write more. Some of them were men, and some of us wanted some of them to write about experimental women poets, gender performativity on the page, masculinity via grotesque, etc. Wanted some of them to write about some of these things more/at all.

What if some of us built a platform? What if the parameters were informal, relatively boundless? What if the form invited conversation and huzzah?

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Well, here’s what some of us offer all of us: It’s a blog, it’s a poetics journal, it’s a platform. From time to time, a post will appear. It will be exciting, provocative, fresh, or bombastic. It will go with your eyes. It will never stop stop making sense, it will always love you, it will probably work.

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